W Post: In Togo, a 10-Year-Old's Muted Cry: 'I Couldn't Take Any More'

[Omaha Steve]

Be sure to click on the photo icon for the gallery.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/12/26/ST2008122600004.html

As the Global Trade in Domestic Workers Surges, Millions of Young Girls Face Exploitation and Abuse

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 26, 2008; Page A01

LOME, Togo -- Adiza ran scared and crying into the street. Ten years old and 4-foot-9, she fled the house where she had worked for more than a year, cleaning and sweeping from before dawn until late at night.

She ran to a woman selling food in the street and told her that since the day she had arrived in this capital city from her village in the country, her employer had beaten her almost daily and kept her in slavelike conditions.

"I couldn't take any more," recalled Adiza, a slight girl with close-cropped hair and almond-shaped eyes, who talked in a halting whisper as she described how her employer beat her with her hands and with cooking pots before the November day she ran away.

Rarely making eye contact, Adiza spoke in a shelter here surrounded by other tiny girls who had suffered physical or sexual abuse in the growing global trade in domestic servants.

The number of girls like Adiza, who leave their communities or even their countries to clean other people's houses, has surged in recent years, according to labor and human rights specialists. The girls in the maid trade, some as young as 5, often go unpaid, and their work in private homes means the abuses they suffer are out of public view.

The International Labor Organization (ILO), a U.N. agency based in Geneva, said more girls under 16 work in domestic service than in any other category of child labor. The organization said that maids are among the most exploited workers and that few nations have adequate regulations to safeguard them.

FULL story at link.

[ogneopasno]

1. Child labor is one of the greatest scourges humanity has faced. I don't use those words lightly.

It is a goddamn crime that children are forced to work -- in the mines, in the garbage piles, in the streets, in the homes, on the battlefields. A crime.

[ColbertWatcher]

2. And the GOP representative in the UN voted against the rights of children ...

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/gashc3941.doc.htm

This is shameful.

Kick and rec for an eye-opening link.

[Bobbieo]

3. What role has Bush's Global Gag Order played in this saga of child abuse?

Remember it was Bush's first official act in 2001 - the Order to cut off US funding for International Planned Parenthood.

[ColbertWatcher]

4. I don't know.

I thought the arsenic ruling was his first order?

[Hydra]

5. Globalization- isn't it grand? n/t

[pop goes the weasel]

6. These problems can be solved

It wasn't really all that long ago that children in Europe and the US also faced similar exploitation. This is why child labor, poverty, and orphans were such a common theme of literature still widely read, from Ann of Green Gables to Heidi to just about any Dickens book you care to pick up. In real life, both my maternal grandparents were child workers, my grandmother a maid like Adiza in Arkansas and my grandfather a hand on the Albert Fall ranch in New Mexico. That was, as you can see if you know history, the early 20th century. I bring this up because it is easy for people to think that child exploitation is somehow peculiar to the "third world," and deplore it but not really try to end it. But just as fairly good safeguards against it have been erected in the West, those same safeguards can be erected elsewhere.